The Poverty Narrative

I am going to open with the dictionary definition of the word Poverty.

We all on the same page? Right.

Now, for all my folks who have chronic illnesses, mental health problems, and whatever else wrong that other people find it hard to talk about - how many of you have found "healthy" people (or people who don't suffer from the same thing as you) trying to find some treatment or cure that you haven't considered? How many have suggested a vast number of potential fixes that you know full well won't work, maybe because you've tried them already?

I've talked about this before. About how people want to believe that there is always something you can do - that there is a reason why this thing has happened to whoever it has happened to, and that as long as they avoid those circumstances, they will be safe from the condition. It's a fallacy of course. Anyone can be suffer from specific mental health ailments. Yet still there is a culture that prevails, that when it eventually happens to us, we fall into a hole of wondering how it could possibly happen to us.

Unfortunately, it is this manifestation of anxiety avoidance that the general public indulges in, that means that cuts to - and lack of provision of - mental health treatment is met with very little protest.

You may start to see where this is going.

Extreme poverty is measured as individuals having to subsist on $1.25 or less. In the past forty years or so - between 1981 and 2008 - the percentage of the world living in those circumstances has reduced significantly, from around 52% to around 22% according to the World Bank. Which is good news, frankly - though a standard "statistical skepticism" should apply here. If the 30% of the world lifted out of that bracket are now all living on $1.30 a day, perhaps we haven't actually made as remarkable progress as we thought. (Especially given that, calculating for average inflation, that bracket should now incorporate people living on $3.04 a day.)

Relative poverty is a different animal. The European Union measures relative poverty as earning 60% or less of the median earnings of the nation you live in. For the UK, median household earnings were £28,400 a year in 2018 - which meant that you were considered to be living in relative poverty if your household income was around £17,000. Just over 20% of households in the UK were considered to be in relative poverty in 2017.

Whose fault is that?

Weird question, I know, but - what is your first instinctive answer to that?

Herein I would like to introduce you to something called secondary poverty - a term coined by sociologist Seebohm Rowntree during his studies of the poor in York in 1899. Secondary poverty is, basically, the idea that people can push themselves into poverty by spending their income on something they don't strictly need to survive. Temperance movements (not The Temperance Movement, they're a band, a good one too, check this out) made a lot of headway on the notion that poor people were often poor because they smoked, drank and gambled their way into poverty.

Which gets to be a great scapegoat.

Herein is a series of tweets made by Claire Lehmann, founding editor of Quillette magazine and apparent member of the "Intellectual Dark Web".

So.

Claire's argument against a person who earns over $10,000,000 a year having 70 cents taxed off their ten million and first dollar...is that poor people are poor not because they don't have money, but because they go out drinking.

She is not alone in projecting this particular viewpoint. It is a perspective often voiced. It's an echo of the puritans, of the Methodist temperance movement, of the US National Anti-Gambling League, of those who happen to have a lot of money themselves, of those who are against any help being given to those who have to go without.

Do they truly believe what they say? I'm not sure. To do so would indicate a significant level of economic ignorance. I'd say it is more likely that they engage in knowing intellectual dishonesty, in order to fit in with the ongoing deception of meritocracy.

People like Claire Lehmann want you to believe that they clearly deserve the wealth they possess, that they have worked for. They have had no unfair disadvantage to acquire it, just as there has been no unfair disadvantage levied against those who lack aforementioned money. Literally anyone can be as successful as she is, as long as they work hard enough. It is important that you believe all this, because then, you will be willing to accept any and all injustice - because clearly, those at the bottom of the pile deserve it, through some kind of personal or moral failing.

(Quillette, so you are aware of their general angle and attitude, has recently published articles about how there's a lot more hoax hate crimes than most people believe, that the most vocal progressives are probably mentally ill, and that socialism is basically evil. It's that kind of "intellectual magazine".)

Anyway.

Poverty is literally a lack of resources. That is its definition. We measure poverty by how little resource individuals and households have. If we accept that solving poverty is a necessary thing - and we should - then the only way TO fix it is to move those resources, to increase the amount of resources available to those without.

Those who argue the loudest that such measures won't help, quite often seem to be those who have an abundance of those resources. A pre-emptive defence of the treasury. And everyone who repeats their angle, everyone that takes up their narrative, reinforces their sense of security. That even the tiniest sliver of reduction of their already-considerable fortune and earnings would be the most grievous wound, regardless of who it helps, of the good it does.

Maybe because they suspect that, if we take that 70 cents from the ten million and first dollar, that we might take the rest of the ten million dollars.

Greed is an easy motivator to project. Something I covered in a blog I wrote a long-ass time ago.

Don't buy into it. Do your research. The wealthy can't be expected to speak for the poor - not while feeding from them.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Gold Bricks & Mortar

I'm gonna lead with this from the County Press, from last month:

The article itself is here.

This is, of course, being pushed as a good thing - which is a perspective I'd like to challenge.

So let's say you are a homeowner. That's neat. Your home is worth more, now, than when you bought it - probably. Fantastic. Great investment! It just doesn't actually mean much, unless you want to sell - or leverage it against a loan.

Though, of course, if you end up buying another place - that increase in value of your own house is probably matched (on average) by the increase of the values of other people's houses. There's variations, obviously - but in the grand scheme of things, a slow and steady increase of home prices just means swapping all the bricks and mortar the same as always.

The banks make more money, of course. Charge the same interest rate on houses that are worth more, it's a no-brainer. Sure, they are leveraging a lot of capital out, but that can't possibly have any negative effect, can it?

Well, as long as nothing bad happens to trigger a large-scale failure of mortgage payments - but then, it's not like there's any probable financial crash on the horizon, is there?

Heaven forbid.

So what if you are one of the 20% of the country that rents? Like 13 million people?

Well, higher house values mean higher rents to pay. You may not experience an increase in your rent during your tenancy - but if you move out, damn sure the next people to move in will be charged more. Probably ahead of the inflation curve, too, which is about 2.3% right now.

What it does mean, though, is that 20% of the country is going to find it harder to actually stop renting.

Which is just fine for the people that OWN the houses.

Two years ago, the total mortgage bill paid - across the entire country, and keep in mind that the number of people paying mortgages is significantly larger than those renting - was almost £58 billion. In comparison, the total rent bill paid for the same period was almost £52 billion.

The fact of the matter is that a fifth of the population is seen as a resource to be tapped - a swathe of the population worth over fifty billion pounds, that it is best to keep in their lane, so they can keep paying.

It's not like rising rent prices is solely a house problem, either.

Speaking entirely personally, I've noticed a lot of places close in my own home town; and every time I have had a chance to speak to those involved, one of the significant (if not sole) factors is the increase in the rent of their property. If your high street is looking devoid, or that new place that seemed to be doing okay had to shut up shop at the end of a rental period, then it might not necessarily be because they aren't making sales.

Housing prices, then. As they grow, so does economic disparity. As they grow, so does the potential backlash of any kind of economic event. And it took precious little for the subprime crisis in 2007 to hole the economy of half the planet.

But hey, who's counting?

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Omission Of Action

So let's say that Superman is real.

There is a comet hurtling towards earth, maybe thrown at us by some invisible enemy, maybe just falling down the gravity well. The impact of this comet will demolish an entire continent, and through the dust-winter that follows, basically kick the earth into an ice age the likes of which 99% of life won't survive.

Superman is aware of it. He knows it is coming.

If he chooses to go do something else rather than stop it - including just standing off to one side and watching - then that's an act of evil, right? Permitting mass extinction through inaction. We can agree that is a bad thing.

Ten points if you know where this is going already.

Let's go back to the starting block.

Superman is real. There is a group of evil men (let's call them the Hurters) that deliberately kill millions every year. Straight-up murder. They're not from the countries that Superman usually does things in, though - and Superman is busy. He can't stop the Hurters, because he's trying to use his Super-planning to fix problems for comparatively wealthy people that are outside of the reach of the Hurters.

He can stop them. It would take time and effort, but it is doable, because he is Superman. He possesses the capability to stop the Hurters. He just doesn't do it, because he's doing something else, even if he is aware of the problem.

That, too, is an act of evil - right? People being killed every day is more important than traffic jams or selling things. Through deliberate inaction, Superman is permitting mass murder. We can agree that that is a bad thing.

Five points if you know where this is going.

Back to the starting block again.

Bruce Wayne is real. The Hurters are killing millions every year, but not directly - instead, they are destroying people's access to safe food and clean water. Seven and a half million a year are killed by hunger and malnutrition, and almost a million are killed by lack of clean water. Eight and a half million people a year, killed by the Hurters - that's the First World War, every five years.

Bruce Wayne knows. He can fix this - he's not super-fast or super-strong, but he has the capability to replace all the lost food and clean water. He can do this despite not being a superhuman, because he has another super-power, which is a vast amount of money. Money becomes resources and manpower which becomes water purifiers and improved farming conditions, and can lobby for better political support to make sure that people don't starve.

Bruce Wayne, instead, spends his time faffing around with advanced technology and making the numbers in his bank account bigger. Perhaps he feels that stopping the Hurters is a job for Superman, though apparently Supes isn't up to the job either, but hey, who is counting? Bruce Wayne is busy. He doesn't stop eight and a half million people a year dying, because he's busy.

That, too, act of evil. People dying from preventable causes through inaction of Bruce Wayne, permitting mass murder at the hands of the Hurters. Those awful Hurters. We can agree that is a bad thing.

Two points if you know where this is going now.

Back to the starting block.

No superheroes, this time. No comic characters. Just people that exist with vast sums of money, which we have already established is an actual super-power. No villains, either - no Hurters. Just eight and a half million people dying every year of the same causes, starvation, malnutrition and lack of clean water.

The people with vast sums of money could fix this. They don't. They're busy.

I'm sure you can put the rest together yourself.

In an unrelated tangent, here's the Forbes rich list:

The Stopwatch

What happens when a creature with a specialised diet loses access to its food of choice?

One must adapt, of course. Which is easier for some creatures than others. Easy for an omnivore to start feeding more on vegetation, for example, than for an insect that relies exclusively on blood to find nutrition in tree sap. It is this specialisation that can lead to an extinction. When crunch time comes around, and blocks start getting knocked out of the food pyramid, survival relies upon the ability to stand upon what's left.

That doesn't really apply to us any more, of course. We've done a lot to ensure that we have quite a wide net to cast out, and if chickens suddenly vanished from the face of the earth, we wouldn't all starve to death. Aside from the chicken farmers, obviously, they'd be pretty fucked - but that's a byproduct of industrialised life, not so much a rarefied diet.

Money, though - money is a rarefied thing.

And there's so many ways of getting money out of us. So many ways of having us make money to be taken.

It's a pretty good setup. People make stuff. The stuff gets sold. People get paid a small percentage of how much the stuff gets sold for. We've talked about this before, through the medium of cake-making. Classic surplus value argument, right?

Here's the thing: there's only so far that model can be pushed before you are paying the people making the stuff absolutely nothing. Which leads to a problem, because a lot of these places are making things that get bought by the kind of people that work at the place in question.

But I mean...you may not have to worry about that, right? Because you can afford to pay your people absolutely nothing - OTHER people will come buy your product and keep your business in the black.

As long as everyone else doesn't get the same idea, right?

What happens then? What happens when nobody is being paid a damn thing, but you still need them to buy your products in order for you to survive?

...whoops.

Well, I mean, that's what minimum wage laws and benefit systems are for, surely. To keep people spending even if they don't have a great job and even if their employer wants to make them work for basically nothing.

A lot of businesses claim they can only stay in business if they pay minimum wage and if that ever goes up, they will be in trouble. This makes my eyebrow twitch. But no matter, that isn't my topic for today.

How do you keep people poor as possible while still taking their goods?

You work out new and interesting ways to take their money, ways that they are required to use.

Nestle owns a shit ton of drinking water. Right near Flint Michigan specifically. If you weren't aware, Flint still doesn't have clean drinking water, which is pretty friggin third world if you imagine how much money will be spent watering golf courses across the US in the next week.

You need water, so they buy the water, and they sell it on.

Whenever you move house, or buy a car, or have to sign a piece of paper for basically anything, charges show up. Handling fees. Charges for the company that deems you worthy of helping to help you, before any other charges are taken out of your wallet.

Go over your bank balance? Charges. Then charges on top of those charges.

The US already has a horribly bureaucratic but thoroughly lucrative engine for extricating cash from individuals for medical treatment - even emergency medical treatment. And even the tiny little "luxuries", such as a mother being able to hold her new baby. Money, just bled right out of people that have no choice other than to spend it.

This places a significant percentage of the population of these countries in a situation wherein a single breakdown of income would be literally catastrophic - and after the debt collectors have had their way (another industry built on profiting from apparent necessity), there's no more there to go back into the system. One more individual, one more household that can't buy the products that are sold by the company that laid them off.

How many of those does it take for a system to crash?

Well, interestingly, we already have a model for that. Back in 2008. The amount of sub-prime mortgages that fell through was actually fairly minor, in order to trigger a financial crisis we've been dealing with for a decade.

The stopwatch is ticking. The parasitic nature of the extraction of money from working folks to other folks keeps going, but sooner or later, the host creature is going to collapse.

Long enough to fill some people's pockets, for sure.

Who cares what happens to the rest of us?